Today in APIs: Gracenote to Launch Music Recommendation API, and 6 New APIs

Gracenote has announced an internet music recommendation API: Gracenote Rhythm. A new API Documentation Workshop will be held in Silicon Valley next month. Plus, Sony provides SmartWatch developers some API advice and 6 new APIs.

Gracenote Announces Gracenote Rhythm

Gracenote, music and video recognition solution provider, has announced a music recommendation API today: Gracenote Rhythm. Gracenote Rhythm will launch in February of 2014 as a RESTful JSON API. The API will use Gracenote's well established music metadata (i.e. genre, mood, era, tempo, origin, artist) alongside adaptive features (e.g. like, dislike, etc.) to provide music recommendations. Developers can use the recommendations to build stations, services, and more based on recommendations.

“The music industry has seen a lot of music services come and go with the exact same Internet Radio solutions that rely heavily on Web-scraped and auto-generated content. We’d like to see some real innovation in the market....At Gracenote, we believe there has to be a human component to creating and delivering Internet Radio – technology can’t do it alone."

API Documentation Writing Workshop Coming to Silicon Valley

The STC Silicon Valley Chapter will host an API Documentation Workshop February 8th in San Jose. The workshop will be led by API Documentation veteran Jim Bisso. Jim has written many books on the topic and has composed API documentation for some of the largest tech companies in the world (i.e. Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Inprise, and Taligent).

The workshop will take place at Nimble Storage, 211 River Oaks Parkway, San Jose, CA 95134. The event will start at 9:00 am and end at 4:00 pm. For more information, or to register, visit the workshop site.

6 New APIs

Today we had 6 new APIs added to our API directory including an agricultural data resource, a calculator widget, a press releases for the department of veterans affairs service and a veteran and beneficiary gravesite location information service. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.

agINFRA API: agINFRA is an Agricultural Data Infrastructure funded by the European Commission. It is designed to connect publicly available agricultural data resources from around the world and make them easily accessible to users from a unified location. The agINFRA API allows users to perform job monitoring, dataset transformation, text mining, and data harvesting functions on such resources.

Croar.net Calculator API: Croar.net provides a simple JavaScript API that allows users to insert a calculator into any webpage using a couple lines of JavaScript code. A demo page is provided to show what the calculator looks like and how it functions. This API is free for public use.

Nationwide Gravesite Locations API: The Nationwide Gravesite Locations API is a data.gov web service providing programmatic access to gravesite locations of U.S. veterans and beneficiaries. This data is provided by a variety of sources, meaning some results contain more information than others. The API is able to return structured data fields such as name, birth or death date, and detailed cemetery information.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Programs API: The Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Programs API is a service of the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) that exposes information from the DVA’s Facilities and Leadership Directory database. This SOAP web service delivers structured information for a treatment facility, including name, address, and program type.

SOI County-to-County Migration Data API: Statistics of Income (SOI) County-to-County Migration Data is a dataset exposed by Data.gov. The data describes year-to-year address changes between counties and states as reported on individual tax returns. Migration data is exposed through two distinct methods. The Inflow method returns data on the number of new residents in a county or state and where those residents migrated from. The Outflow method returns data on the number of residents leaving a county or state and where they went. Both methods are able to return the total gross income of the migrants.

About the author:Eric Carter
Eric the founder of Dartsand and Corporate Counsel for a specialty technology distributor. He is a frequent contributor to technology media outlets and also serves as primary legal counsel for multiple startups in the Real Estate, Virtual Assistant, and Software Development Industries. Follow me on Google+